The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier

by Bronson, Edgar Beecher

  Released, the balloon sprang upward at a pace that all but took our breath away. Instantly the earth disappeared beneath us. We saw Donaldson pull the safety valve wide open, draw his sheath knife ready to cut the drag rope, standing rigid, with his eyes riveted upon the aneroid barometer. The hand of the barometer was sweeping across the dial at a terrific rate. I glanced at Donaldson and saw him smile. Then I looked back the barometer and saw the hand had stopped—at 10,200 feet! How long we were ascending we did not know. Certain it is that the impressions described were all there was time for, and that when Donaldson turned and spoke we saw his lips move but could hear no sound. Our speed had been such that the pressure of the air upon the tympanum of the ear left us deaf for some minutes. We had made a dash of two miles into cloudland and had accomplished it, we three firmly believed, in little more than a minute.

  Presently Donaldson observed the anchor and grapnel had come up badly clogged with sod, and a good heavy tug he and I had of it to pull them in, for Lyons was still much too busy with his currant pie to help us. Nor indeed were the currant pies yet done with us, for at the end of our tug at the anchor rope, I found| had been kneeling very precisely in the middle of pie No. 2, and had contrived to absorb most of it into the knees of my trousers. Thus at the end of the day, come to Saratoga after all shops were closed, I had to run the gauntlet of the porch and office crowd of visitors at the United States Hotel in a condition that only needed moccasins and a war bonnet to make me a tolerable imitation of an Indian.

  We remained aloft at an altitude of one or two and one half miles for three hours and a half, stayed there until the silence became intolerable, until the buzz of a fly or the croak of a frog would have been music to our ears. Here was absolute silence, the silence of the grave and death, a silence never to be experienced by living man in any terrestrial condition.

  Occasionally the misty clouds in which we hung enshrouded parted beneath us and gave us glimpses of distant earth, opened and disclosed landscapes of infinite beauty set in grey nebulous frames. Once we passed above a thunderstorm, saw the lightning play beneath us, felt our whole fabric tremble at its shock—and were glad enough when we had left it well behind. Seen from a great height, the earth looked to be a vast expanse of dark green velvet, sometimes shaded to a deeper hue by cloudlets floating beneath the sun, splashed here with the silver and there with the gold garniture reflected from rippling waters.

  Toward noon we descended beneath the region of clouds into the realm of light and life, and found ourselves hovering above the Mountain House of the Catskills. And thereabouts we drifted in cross-currents until nearly 4.00 p.m., when a heavy southerly gale struck us and swept us rapidly northward past Albany at a pace faster than I have ever travelled on a railway.

  We still had ballast enough left to assure ten or twelve hours more travel. But we did not like our course. The prospects were that we would end our voyage in the wilderness two hundred or more miles north of Ottawa. So we rose to 12,500 feet, seeking an easterly or westerly current, but without avail. We could not escape the southerly gale. Prudence, therefore, dictated a landing before nightfall. Landing in the high gale was both difficult and dangerous, and was not accomplished until we were all much bruised and scratched in the oak thicket Donaldson chose for our descent.

  Thus the first voyage of the good airship Barnum ended at 6.07 p.m. on the farm of E. R. Young, nine miles north of Saratoga.

  A year later the Barnum rose for the last time—from Chicago—and to this day the fate of the stanch craft and her brave captain remains an unsolved mystery.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE EVOLUTION OF A TRAIN ROBBER

  Life was never dull in Grant County, New Mexico, in the early eighties. There was always something doing—usually something the average law-abiding, peace-loving citizen would have been glad enough to dispense with. To say that life then and there was insecure is to describe altogether too feebly a state of society and an environment wherein Death, in one violent form or another, was ever abroad, seldom long idle, always alert for victims.

  When the San Carlos Apaches, under Victoria, Ju, or Geronimo, were not out gunning for the whites, the whites were usually out gunning for one another over some trivial difference. Everybody carried a gun and was more or less handy with it. Indeed, it was a downright bad plan to carry one unless you were handy. For with gunning—the game most played, if not precisely the most popular—every one was supposed to be familiar with the rules and to know how to play; and in a game where every hand is sure to be "called," no one ever suspected another of being out on a sheer "bluff." Thus the coroner invariably declared it a case of suicide where one man drew a gun on another and failed to use it.

  This highly explosive state of society was not due to the fact that there were few peaceable men in the country for there were many of them, men of character and education, honest, and as law-abiding as their peculiar environment would permit. Moreover, the percentage of professional "bad men"—and this was a profession then—was comparatively small. It was due rather to the fact that every one, no matter how peaceable his inclinations, was compelled to carry arms habitually for self-defence, for the Apaches were constantly raiding outside the towns, and white outlaws inside. And with any class of men who constantly carry arms, it always falls out that a weapon is the arbiter of even those minor personal differences which in the older and more effete civilization of the East are settled with fists or in a petty court.

  The prevailing local contempt for any man who was too timid to "put up a gun fight" when the etiquette of a situation demanded it, was expressed locally in the phrase that one "could take a corncob and a lightning bug and make him run himself to death trying to get away." It is clearly unnecessary to explain why the few men of this sort in the community did not occupy positions of any particular prominence. Their opinions did not seem to carry as much weight as those of other gentlemen who were known to be notably quick to draw and shoot.

  I even recall many instances where the pistol entered into the pastimes of the community. One instance will stand telling:

  A game of poker (rather a stiff one) had been going on for about a fortnight in the Red Light Saloon. The same group of men, five or six old friends, made up the game every day. All had varying success but one, who lost every day. And, come to think of it, his luck varied too, for some days he lost more than others. While he did not say much about his losings, it was observed that temper was not improving.

  This sort of thing went on for thirteen days. The thirteenth day the loser happened to come in a little late, after the game was started. It also happened that on this particular day one of the players had brought in a friend, a stranger in the town, to join the game, When the loser came in, therefore, he was introduced to the stranger and sat down. A hand was dealt him. He started to play it, stopped, rapped on the table attention, and said:

  "Boys, I want to make a personal explanation to this yere stranger. Stranger, this yere game is sure a tight wad for a smoothbore. I'm loser in it, an' a heavy one, for exactly thirteen days, and these boys all understand that the first son of a gun I find I can beat, I'm going to take a six-shooter an' make him play with me a week. Now, if you has no objections to my rules, you can draw cards."

  Luckily for the stranger, perhaps, the thirteenth was as bad for the loser as its predecessors.

  Outside the towns there were only three occupations in Grant County in those years, cattle ranching, mining and fighting Apaches, all of a sort to attract and hold none but the sturdiest types of real manhood, men inured to danger and reckless of it. In the early eighties no faint-heart came to Grant County unless he blundered in—and any such were soon burning the shortest trail out. These men were never better described in a line than when, years ago, at a banquet of California Forty-niners, Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, speaking of the splendid types the men of forty-nine represented, said:

  "The cowards never started, and all the weak died on the road
!"

  Within the towns, also, there were only three occupations: first, supplying the cowmen and miners whatever they needed, merchandise wet and dry, law mundane and spiritual, for although neither court nor churches were working overtime, they were available for the few who had any use for them; second, gambling, at monte, poker, or faro; and, third, figuring how to slip through the next twenty-four hours without getting a heavier load of lead in one's system than could be conveniently carried, or how to stay happily half shot and yet avoid coming home on a shutter, unhappily shot, or, having an active enemy on hand, how best to "get" him.

  Thus, while plainly the occupations of Grant County folk were somewhat limited in variety, in the matter of interest and excitement their games were wide open and the roof off.

  Nor did all the perils to life in Grant County lurk within the burnished grooves of a gun barrel, according to certain local points of view, for always it is the most unusual that most alarms, as when one of my cowboys "allowed he'd go to town for a week," and was back on the ranch the evening of the second day. Asked why he was back so soon, he replied:

  "Well, fellers, one o' them big depot water tanks burnt plumb up this mawnin', an' reckonin' whar that'd happen a feller might ketch fire anywhere in them little old town trails, I jes' nachally pulled my freight for camp!"

  But a cowboy is the subject of this story—Kit Joy. His genus, and striking types of the genus, have been cleverly described, especially by Lewis and by Adams (some day I hope to meet Andy) that I need say little of it here. Still, one of the cowboy's most notable and most admirable traits has not been emphasized so much as it deserves: I mean his downright reverence and respect for womanhood. No real cowboy ever wilfully insulted any woman, or lost a chance to resent any insult offered by another. Indeed, it was an article of the cowboy creed never broken, and all well knew it. So it happened that when one day a cowboy, in a crowded car of a train held up by bandits, was appealed to by an Eastern lady in the next seat,—

  "Heavens! I have four hundred dollars in my purse which I cannot afford to lose; please, sir, tell me how I can hide it."

  Instantly came the answer:

  "Shucks! miss, stick it in yer sock; them fellers has nerve enough to hold up a train an' kill any feller that puts up a fight, but nary one o' them has nerve enough to go into a woman's sock after her bank roll!"

  Kit Joy was a cowboy working on the X ranch on the Gila. He was a youngster little over twenty. It was said of him that he had left behind him in Texas more or less history not best written in black ink, but whether this was true or not I do not know. Certain it is that he was a reckless dare-devil, always foremost in the little amenities cowboys loved to indulge in when they came to town such as shooting out the lights in saloons and generally "shelling up the settlement,"—which meant taking a friendly shot at about everything that showed up on the streets. Nevertheless, Kit in the main was thoroughly good-natured and amiable.

  Early in his career in Silver City it was observed that perhaps his most distinguishing trait was curiosity. Ultimately his curiosity got him into trouble, as it does most people who indulge it. His first display of curiosity in Silver was a very great surprise, even to those who knew him best. It was also a disappointment.

  A tenderfoot, newly arrived, appeared on the streets one day in knickerbockers and stockings. Kit was in town and was observed watching the tenderfoot. To the average cowboy a silk top hat was like a red flag to a bull, so much like it in fact that the hat was usually lucky to escape with less than half a dozen holes through it. But here in these knee-breeches and stockings was something much more bizarre and exasperating than a top hat, from a cowboy's point of view. The effect on Kit was therefore closely watched by the bystanders.

  No one fancied for a moment that Kit would do less than undertake to teach the tenderfoot "the cowboy's hornpipe," not a particularly graceful but a very quick step, which is danced most artistically when a bystander is shooting at the dancer's toes. Indeed, the ball was expected to open early. To every one's surprise and disappointment, it did not. Instead, Kit dropped in behind the tenderfoot and began to follow him about town—followed him for at least an hour. Every one thought he was studying up some more unique penalty for the tenderfoot. But they were wrong, all wrong.

  As a matter of fact. Kit was so far consumed with curiosity that he forgot everything else, forgot even to be angry. At last, when he could stand it no longer, he walked up to the tenderfoot, detained him gently by the sleeve and asked in a tone of real sympathy and concern: "Say, mistah! 'Fo' God, won't yo' mah let yo' wear long pants?"

  Naturally the tenderfoot's indignation was aroused and expressed, but Kit's sympathies for a man condemned to such a juvenile costume were so far stirred that he took no notice of it.

  Kit was a typical cowboy, industrious, faithful, uncomplaining, of the good old Southern Texas breed. In the saddle from daylight till dark, riding completely down to the last jump in them two or three horses a day, it never occurred to him even to growl when a stormy night, with thunder and lightning, prolonged his customary three-hour's turn at night guard round the herd to an all-night's vigil. He took it as a matter of course. And his rope and running iron were ever ready, and his weather eye alert for a chance to catch and decorate with the X brand any stray cattle that ventured within his range. This was a peculiar phase of cowboy character. While not himself profiting a penny by these inroads on neighboring herds, he was never quite so happy as when he had added another maverick to the herd bearing his employer's brand, an increase always obtained at the expense of some of the neighbors.

  One night on the Spring round-up, the day's work finished, supper eaten, the night horses caught and saddled, the herd in hand driven into a close circle and bedded down for the night in a little glade in the hills, Kit was standing first relief. The day's drive had been a heavy one, the herd was well grazed and watered in the late afternoon, the night was fine; and so the twelve hundred or fifteen hundred cattle in the herd were lying down quietly, giving no trouble to the night herders. Kit, therefore, was jogging slowly round the herd, softly jingling his spurs and humming some rude love song of the sultry sort cowboys never tire of repeating. The stillness of the night superinduced reflection. With naught to interrupt it, Kit's curiosity ran farther afield than usual.

  Recently down at Lordsburg, with the outfit shipping a train load of beeves, he had seen the Overland Express empty its load of passengers for supper, a crowd of well-dressed men and women, the latter brilliant with the bright colors cowboys love and with glittering gems. To-night he got to thinking about them.

  Wherever did they all come from? How ever did they get so much money? Surely they must come from 'Frisco. No lesser place could possibly turn out such magnificence. Then Kit let his fancy wander off into crude cowboy visions of what 'Frisco might be like, for he had never seen a city.

  "What a buster of a town 'Frisco must be!" Kit soliloquized. "Must have more'n a hundred saloons an' more slick gals than the X brand has heifers. What a lot o' fun a feller could have out thar! Only I reckon them gals wouldn't look at him more'n about onct unless he was well fixed for dough. Reckon they don't drink nothin' but wine out thar, nor eat nothin' but oysters. An' wine an' oysters costs money, oodles o' money! That's the worst of it! S'pose it'd take more'n a month's pay to git a feller out thar on the kiars, an' then about three months' pay to git to stay a week. Reckon that's jes' a little too rich for Kit's blood. But, jiminy! Wouldn't I like to have a good, big, fat bank roll an' go thar!"

  Here was a crisis suddenly come in Kit's life, although he did not then realize it. It is entirely improbable he had ever before felt the want of money. His monthly pay of thirty-five dollars enabled him to sport a pearl-handled six-shooter and silver-mounted bridle bit and spurs, kept him well clothed, and gave him an occasional spree in town. What more could any reasonable cowboy ask?

  But to-night the very elements and all nature were against him. Even a light dash of rain to
rouse the sleeping herd, or a hungry cow straying out into the darkness, would have been sufficient to divert and probably save him; but nothing happened. The night continued fine. The herd slept on. And Kit was thus left an easy prey, since covetousness had come to aid curiosity in compassing his ruin.

  "A bank roll! A big, fat, full-grown, long-horned, four-year-old roll! That's what a feller wants to do 'Frisco right. Nothin' less. But whar's it comin' from, an' when? S'pose I brands a few mavericks an' gits a start on my own? No use, Kit; that's too slow! Time you got a proper roll you'd be so old the skeeters wouldn't even bite you, to say nothin' of a gal a-kissin' of you. 'Pears like you ain't liable to git thar very quick, Kit, 'less you rustles mighty peart somewhar. Talkin' of rustlin', what's the matter with that anyway?"

  A cold glitter came in Kit's light blue eyes. The muscles of his lean, square jaws worked nervously. His right hand dropped caressingly on the handle of his pistol.

  "That's the proper caper, Kit. Why didn't you think of it before? Rustle, damn you, an', ef you're any good, mebbe so you can git to 'Frisco afore frost comes, or anywhere else you likes. Rustle! By jiminy, I've got it; I'll jes' stand up that thar Overland Express. Them fellers what rides on it's got more'n they've got any sort o' use for. What's the matter with makin' 'em whack up with a feller! 'Course they'll kick, an' thar'll be a whole passle o' marshals an' sheriffs out after you, but what o' that? Reckon Old Blue'll carry you out o' range. He's the longest-winded chunk o' horse meat in these parts. Then you'll have to stay out strictly on the scout fer a few weeks, till they gits tired o' huntin' of you, so you can slip out o' this yere neck o' woods 'thout leavin' a trail.

  "An' Lord! but won't it be fun! 'Bout as much fun, I reckon, as doin' 'Frisco. Won't them tenderfeet beller when they hears the guns a-crackin' an' the boys a-yellin'! Le' see; wonder who I'd better take along?"